Cruising

Edgar Oliver’s park stories.

Edgar Oliver’s one-man show, “In the Park,” is a love story about moments.Credit Photograph by Alice O’Malley

I’m afraid it was the limited, prejudiced part of my nature that prevented me from acknowledging, before now, the writer and performer Edgar Oliver and his emotionally grand work. Although Oliver and I are both gay and share similar interests—he has been a ubiquitous presence on New York’s downtown theatre scene for almost thirty years—I tended to dismiss his earlier performances as affected and self-conscious, camp that built on camp. But his current monologue, “In the Park” (respectfully directed by Randy Sharp, at the Axis), is so beautiful—so enthralling in its undisguised but never tedious self-absorption, in its command of the spoken word, and in its demand for love—that to remain unmoved by it, or to dismiss it as fairy folderol, begs the question: Why?

My list of grievances against Oliver as an artist was long. First, there was his voice, that stately and sonorous bass that made him sound like a mannered stage actor in an early talking picture, enunciating so carefully you just wanted the words to stop. Then there was his cultivated look—the russet-colored hair and the enormous flashing eyes that brought to mind that perverse fantasist Daddy Carroll, from Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film, “My Own Private Idaho,” or Cecil Beaton’s portraits of the British aesthete Stephen Tennant, who spent much of the latter part of his life in bed, for no reason other than that he preferred it. I didn’t want Oliver, with his precious affect and his Ronald Firbank airs, to matter in my seemingly tougher, more “real” gay world.

But soon after Oliver, dressed all in black, unceremoniously took the stage in the Axis’s low-ceilinged performance space and looked out at the audience with a tender expression, my smugness began to shift. Oliver was so clearly used to being confronted with intolerance like mine, and yet he was able to keep moving bravely, expansively forward. Still, he confesses, at the start of his hour-long piece, “I am a hesitant man. It seems to me that I have spent my life half lost in some rapturous dream I dreamt as a child, from which I have never awakened. Perhaps I don’t want to wake up. If I woke—I would find that I have failed to live.” As he goes on, Oliver slowly makes his audience understand that theatre, once stripped of its standard smoke and mirrors, is a storytelling medium, wonderfully reducible to two or three essentials: actor and text and that unidentifiable something which visionaries such as Artaud call magic.

Oliver, who is fifty-seven, stands at the front of the stage and addresses the audience directly. After a while, the lights behind him, delicately designed by David Zeffren, dim and then come up again—and do so throughout the piece, whenever he pauses between anecdotes or thoughts. (Paul Carbonara’s musical interludes punctuate the monologue as well.) There are no props, no lamppost or bench to help us visualize what Oliver describes: the days and occasional nights that he spends in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which he loves, especially the areas that are largely unexplored by others. In the verdant, run-down spaces he seeks out, he finds a refuge where he can write the story that he’s telling us now. (Oliver’s bohemianism—that is, his ability to make do with little, and then make more—is entirely genuine.)

Oliver fills the stage with gestures: with one hand, he draws a chair or a patch of grass or a person, and the atmosphere that he creates with his astonishing sentences is an extension of his body—which is integral to the story of his isolation. As a boy growing up in Savannah, Georgia, Oliver would go to Maryland in the summers, to visit his grandmother, with his sister and his eccentric mother. (He never mentions his father.) In Baltimore, Oliver was entranced by a statue in a fountain. He explains:

At its center sprouts a thicket of bronze bulrushes. Amidst the bulrushes a naked boy of bronze laughs and dances on a turtle’s back. He seems in the midst of leaping. . . . I loved this statue. The music of the fountain’s waters was for me the music of the rain. I loved rain above all things. It was as though this naked dancing boy lived in a world of eternal rain. In Savannah, when it rained . . . I felt myself go wandering through in the rain—as though I were some other boy—some wild boy out there wandering.

Oliver identifies not with other people but with objects, like that fountain, like the water. Human beings are a danger. From a bridge in Prospect Park, he notices some “black boys on bicycles.” He stands, “frozen with terror, thinking, They are going to kill me.” He feels himself “so murderable there among the woods—on the black side of the park—so murderable by teen-aged black boys on bicycles. How could they resist murdering me?” With this, the piece takes an enormous leap into autobiographical brilliance. Oliver’s panic about his difference from those boys is a way of being proud of it, too; imagining his imminent victimhood allows him to star in the drama of being, on a stage constructed by those living, flesh-and-blood boys. But Oliver doesn’t, like Jean Genet, equate violence or degradation with eroticism. There’s no real system to his revelations. As a performer, he is as vulnerable to his audience as we are to him. (The night I saw the show, the audience collectively held its breath when Oliver brought up those “black boys” and his terror of them. We didn’t know where he was going with the story. Or, more specifically, we didn’t want him to go to the predictable place. And he didn’t. He even preëmpted our response by admitting, “It seems strange to me now that I could have been so convinced those boys were going to kill me. They were just teen-aged boys on bicycles playing in the park.”)

As the evening continues, it becomes increasingly clear that “In the Park” is a love story about moments and sensations: Oliver rhapsodizes about rain and darkness and the sun and the soul music that he hears at a McDonald’s where he sometimes goes to write. He ends his meditation with a scene of shared human emotion. One evening, as he is leaving the park, where he was “trying to write something about the end of summer—trying to write, well . . . this,” a young black man asks, as he passes, “Were there many pretty boys?” The young man, who is called Durrance, then stops to make a suggestion: “Let’s go somewhere and make love. Then I can get some money. You see—I say what I mean. And when I see something I like I say it.” Oliver tells us, “I felt flattered—because he had said when he looked at me he saw something he liked. Also I felt deeply flustered and troubled by desire.” Desire is an emotion that no artist can control—until it fades and its vapors become part of the story. Oliver doesn’t gloss over his excitement at Durrance’s proposition. He has felt invisible for much of his life, an invisibility that he relished: it freed him to feel more like an element—like the rain he loves, like the night that is his friend—than like a person, something he understands less than he understands statues. But now, in the park, he has been noticed, as a man.

At one point in his 2008 monologue “East 10th Street: Self-Portrait with Empty House,” Oliver tells of his love for a boy named Jason. One night, they get drunk and quarrel. Then comes this extraordinary—and extraordinarily described—moment:

Suddenly I jolted awake on the bed. It was broad daylight. . . . I looked around in a panic for Jason, and, thank God, there he was lying on the bed beside me, curled up with his back to me, sleeping. I had to talk to him. I reached over and took him by the shoulder to shake him, to wake him. But his shoulder came off in my hand. His entire arm came away. In horror, I dropped it. I grabbed at his back, but his whole back disintegrated at my touch. I began clawing for him—clawing at the bedclothes—but piece by piece Jason came apart in my hands—unravelled and disappeared into thin air until I was down to the bare mattress. . . . What I had thought was Jason was just a pile of bedclothes.

For gay men of Oliver’s generation—gay men who survived AIDS—romanticism, and not sex, became the dominant mode: dreaming about a man wouldn’t kill you. And yet there was still the need to connect physically; we are all bodies. Oliver is constantly clawing his way through absence to get to something that he doesn’t immediately recognize: that satisfying moment when heartbeat meets heartbeat. He doesn’t take Durrance up on his offer, but both men are changed by the conversation. Durrance kisses Oliver, then wanders off into the post-twilight rain, leaving Oliver, ever the artist, to give shape to this shared experience of love in another shadow world—the theatre. ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, wrote the catalogue essay for the Robert Gober retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.